Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  From dramatic hospitalisation in May, he progressed to June graduation. He was designated to do duty as one of two students charged with supervising the ‘second spring collection of clothing, magazines and text-books’ from Apley Hall when the end-of term recycling ‘wagon’ called on Friday 20 May – another indication that he was considered a safe administrative pair of hands.74 Though not on course to graduate with great distinction, he had recovered. His graduation ‘Ode’ was ready for publication in the June Advocate. He received grades of B+ for his Chaucer course and B for Professor Baker’s Drama course, but got A- for English 24, and straight A’s in Babbitt’s French class and Santayana’s Philosophy 10.75 Even his relieved father recognised that he had been ‘working so hard’.76

  Then, on Friday 24 June, graduation day arrived. The Boston Evening Transcript recorded how ‘A pleasant east wind tempered the heat, yet left the air warm enough to tempt the girls to wear their filmiest of Class Day gowns.’ Harvard’s lawns were verdant after the previous week’s rain. In the Yard, where the old elms looked sadly ‘moth-eaten’, most of the Seniors assembled in front of Holworthy Hall and ‘marched’ to Appleton Chapel where Tom’s Philosophy professor, G. H. Palmer, offered prayers. Then at 10.30 a.m. there was a procession to Sanders Theatre. During the ceremonies there Edward Eyre Hunt read an interminable poem of his own composition; William Richard Ohler, emphasising ‘service’, orated on the topic of ‘Harvard and the Community’. Tom’s proud parents heard the Class Ode ‘recited by Thomas Stearns Eliot and then sung by the class to the tune “Fair Harvard,” the singing being led by the class chorister, Twining Lynes’. Tom’s ode’s two eight-line stanzas concluded elegantly, formally, and in a style as far removed from that of Jules Laforgue as can be imagined. Piously he wished for a Harvard-centred vision:

  And only the years that efface and destroy

  Give us also the vision to see

  What we owe for the future, the present, and past,

  Fair Harvard, to thine and to thee.77

  Twenty-first-century readers may hear in that penultimate line an anticipation of the opening of the first of Four Quartets, but for the Eliot family on 24 June 1910 there was the much more pressing matter of ‘a monster garden party’. Bands were ‘playing in all parts of the grounds’.78 For twenty-one-year-old Tom, who had managed to get his own way, there was summer, and the promise of Paris.

  7

  Voyages

  BEFORE going to Paris, Tom went to Gloucester. That was his custom every summer, though often, with student friends, he voyaged beyond. So scanty are the records of these voyages, it is impossible to date most of them accurately, but they were important parts of his youth. Boyhood sailing lessons had given him both the assurance and dexterity necessary to handle a boat. With his ‘sensitive nature’, he may have kept a good deal of his imaginative life to himself, but on the water he felt relaxed.1 He and his brother loved to put the sailboat Elsa through her paces, tacking alertly on the waters off Eastern Point.

  His confidence at Gloucester surprised Harvard classmates. Tinckom-Fernandez, who knew him well, recalled that ‘in his sophomore year he decided to complete his course in three years and take a master’s degree’. Occasionally at ‘initiations and punch nights’, Tom came ‘to expand, in the midst of our hilarity, into his quiet, subtle humor’. Though friends like Howard Morris, relishing the Bolo poems, knew Tom’s humour could be anything but subtle, Tinckom-Fernandez recalled him in thoughtful mood: ‘He was always ready to lay his book aside and fill his pipe. With his analytical mind his curiosity was insatiable as to the meanings and motives in the literary and social currents of our day. He was always the commentator, never the gusty talker, and seemed to cultivate even then a scholarly detachment.’ Yet in vacation time, visiting Tom at the Downs ‘in a quiet, charming family circle of parents and sisters’, Tinckom-Fernandez was impressed by how his friend ‘used to take me sailing in his catboat, and he could handle a sheet with the best in Gloucester’.2

  He and Tom kept in touch, even after ‘Tinck’ set off for Europe in 1913, the year he married. Tom saw him off from the Boston docks. They corresponded for a time, but their letters are lost. So is all Tom’s correspondence with his closest sailing partner, Harold Peters. Their maritime exploits are recorded in written fragments and photographs. Tom’s sense of the sea pervades his poetry. Some of his coastal cruising, especially while he was younger, was along the granite shore of Cape Ann, or past the Dry Salvages, familiar, he later explained, as ‘a group of three rocks off the eastern corner of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, with a beacon: convenient for laying a course to the eastward, Maine, or Nova Scotia’.3 This was the direction he liked to sail in, though sometimes, too, he seems to have headed south towards John Robinson’s Salem, or Marblehead. According to Leon Little, Harold ‘Pete’ Peters introduced Tom

  to small-boat cruising and they made many cruises together between Marblehead and the Canadian border. The most spectacular episode of any in these cruises was when, in a 19-foot knockabout, before the days of power, they rounded Mt. Desert Rock in a dungeon of fog, a rough sea and a two-reef breeze. The log book, the next day, shows a sketch of Tom in the tender in a heavy wind unmooring from an enormous pile mooring at Duck Island. The title of the sketch is ‘Heroic work by the swab.’ They had spent an uncomfortable night at that mooring and had decided in spite of the continuing fog, wind and heavy sea, to leave there for Mt. Desert and a protected harbour. So, now with three reefs, they headed inshore and finally anchored at the little land-locked harbour of Somesville. The last entry in the log for that day was ‘Ashore for supper at Somes House, $1, excellent.’4

  This voyage to what is now part of Acadia National Park was probably Tom’s most dangerous. Mount Desert Rock is a remote, treeless island with a nineteenth-century lighthouse and keeper’s accommodation. Peters had cruised that part of Maine since at least 1908, when his name and that of Chuck Cobb, another of Tom’s Harvard acquaintances, appear in the register of the old inn in the village of North Haven.5 In 1909 Tom postcarded his mother to say he was having a ‘pleasant and lazy’ time in ‘very warm weather’ not far from ‘North Haven’.6 Leon Little, an experienced sailor, thought the trip Tom and Peters made ‘around Mt. Desert Rock in the Lynx’ was ‘crazy’; the Lynx was probably the smallest sailboat ever to accomplish such a voyage without power.7 Little was amazed Tom and Harold Peters had survived.

  That they did so is a tribute to their seamanship and luck. An experienced sailor, Peters was naturally sporty in a way that Tom was not. Unsettled, he never married, and would go on to spend much of his life at sea. On a boat, both he and Tom fitted in. Tom liked the camaraderie of such voyages. They introduced him to characters very different from his Harvard professors, though the on-board food was no Signet dinner. When Peters and Leon Little made a trip on the Lynx together, Leon boasted they lived entirely on ‘bacon, beans, bread and bananas’.8 A surviving photograph shows Tom in casual hat and short-sleeved shirt, at the wheel of a boat, steering while his companion (‘probably Harold Peters’) smokes; there was ample liquid refreshment.9 Though he remembered sleeping at Peters’s mother’s house, usually Tom and Peters slept on board the Lynx or, later, the Arethusa.10 It is clear from Little’s correspondence at Harvard that he expected Tom and Peters would have shared Bolovian compositions as part of their close association. Another of Tom’s Harvard sailing pals, Clarence Little (also nicknamed ‘Pete’), treasured memories of Columbo and Bolo verses.

  At least among some of the young men of Tom’s circle, these scurrilous poems were useful currency, but he was impressed when, in small-town Maine ports, he met old sailors whose vocabulary might be even more shocking. ‘About COARSENESS’, he wrote, years later, to Ezra Pound, ‘I don’t want to boast, so I wont tell you what Capn Eben Lake of Jonesport said to Capn Joe Tibbetts of East Machias about me.’ Gleefully he mentioned ‘old Ike Carver of Mosquito Cove … who fucked the whole of Marshall’s Island in one night, at th
e age of 70’.11 For the rest of his life he remembered meeting locals when he sailed to places such as Jonesport, Roque Island and Cutler, Maine. ‘(I shall never forget’, he wrote in a parenthesis to Leon Little almost half a century later, ‘Pete leading the Grand March at the Jonesport Summer Ball with Mrs. Willie Carver, you never saw anything more respectable) and Lakeman’s (we never got to the Wolves, there were said to be some tough lads there)’.12 Mrs Willie Carver, then in her forties, was Martha Guptill, married to Jonesport lobsterman William Carver and part of a local lobster-fishing family.13 In the 1950s, remembering this incident, Tom tried to recall a ‘nautical ballad’ that ‘starts so magnificently: It was the schooner Lapwing / From Jonesport bore away…’14 This was the ballad ‘Cruise of the Lapwing’, composed in 1870 by John Radley, a Jonesport commercial fisherman; it was still being sung by celebrated local balladeer and storyteller Joshua Alley in 1936 when he was ninety-three. It may well have been Alley’s singing that Tom remembered from the early twentieth century:

  The good schooner Lapwing, from Jonesport bears away

  She being all spars and canvas, from her bows she heaves the spray

  And as she passes through the Reach and down Kelley stand

  We are going winter fishing to the Isle of Grand Manan.

  The air is very cold and vapour o’er the ocean spread

  With her lofty spars and canvas, she nobly leaps ahead

  And by the wind and on her course, looks up for Cutler head.

  Now in Cutler Harbor and safe at anchor rides

  With plenty scope ahead of her, to stem the winter tides.

  From there this ballad takes the Lapwing northwards, away from ‘girls on shore’ who are ‘most jovial company, to pass away the time’. The boat enters stormy waters where ‘The wind is fast a-canting, and blowing a half a gale’. Finding few fish, the voyagers reach an ice-scape: ‘the ocean is one white sheet; the air is filled with snow and hail’. Here ‘amid the ice and snow’ the crew hear of a race between schooners ‘down by the Duck Islands’.15 Though he seems never to have sailed in winter up into the ice, Tom loved to recall his adventures in the maritime world of such ballads, the milieu he had read about, too, in Captains Courageous. Grand Manan, an island between Maine and New Brunswick (familiar territory to Gloucester fishermen), was at the northern extremity of Tom’s voyaging. Years later, recalling ‘those places along the coast where Harold Peters and I used to cruise so regularly’, he relished again ‘the famous occasion on which Peters and I spent the night moored to a spar buoy on the lee shore of Duck Island during such a fog, combined with half a gale of wind’.16 Eventually they had gone ashore and called at a dwelling.

  Such voyaging could be dangerous. This strain of Tom’s experience, mixed with and submerged beneath his reading, would permeate his mature poetry, whether in the ‘Gull against the wind, in the windy straits / Of Belle Isle’ in ‘Gerontion’ (the Strait of Belle Isle is between Quebec and Newfoundland), or in that long voyage ‘From the Dry Salvages to the eastern banks’ on which ‘everything’ goes ‘wrong’ in the drafts of The Waste Land. Tom cut most of that passage, which involved sailing away from ‘girls and gin’ onshore at ‘Marm Brown’s joint’ and voyaging beyond ‘the farthest northern islands’ to ‘a long white line’, a white-out landscape of ‘bears’ and ‘cracked ice’. In the end, he excised everything except the final, eerie drowning of ‘Death by Water’. Re-imagined and modified, details there come from experiences he and his student friends had shared: ‘The canned baked beans were only a putrid stench’. As in ‘The Dry Salvages’ itself, the vocabulary is that of a man familiar with sailing: ‘the main gaffaws / Jammed … A spar split … then the garboard-strake began to leak’.17 That leaking ‘garboard strake’ would recur in ‘Marina’, a poem whose pencil manuscript draft locates its foggy setting ‘Off Roque Island’ in Maine, and which still in its published version communicates wonderfully a sense of lying offshore in fog: ‘What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands / What water lapping the bow’.18

  By the end of Tom’s Harvard days Harold Peters was getting ready to set off on much more distant voyages. Capable yet boyish, he liked Tom, and may even have had a crush on him, but there is no evidence it was reciprocated. Later in life Tom realised that these voyages up the New England coast had become indelibly fixed in his memory. They were a valuable part of him that few of his subsequent friends knew about. His poetry alone shows how deeply such experiences affected him. His days at sea, watching the coast and the fog, or coming ashore to communities of lobstermen and yarners were in their way just as formative as his time spent in the classrooms of Irving Babbitt or hunched over the poems of Laforgue.

  Tom’s rounding of Mount Desert Rock might have resulted in his failing to come home. So, in a different sense, might his 1910 transatlantic voyaging. Long afterwards he made it clear that during the academic session 1910–11 he thought very seriously about ‘giving up English and trying to settle down and scrape along in Paris and gradually write French’, as had two earlier minor, Symbolist-affiliated American poets, ‘Stuart Merrill and Vielé-Griffin’.19 Such behaviour would have horrified his parents. He embarked on his first ever transatlantic journey in October 1910, in an era when the crossing took about a week. These voyages were phenomena in themselves. Alan Dale’s The Great Wet Way, illustrated with comic sketches, gives a fine flavour of what passengers might expect. On board ship there was the chance to ‘“loaf” a bit’. Dale eavesdrops on typical on-board conversations. ‘“If I loved Parrus, I should think myself a very poor sort of American”, says one woman. “I tell you that Syracuse could give lessons to Parrus any day in the week. Parrus belongs to the past; we belong to the future.”’20

  This was not Tom’s attitude. Instead, recalling 1910–11, he told a French audience, ‘Tantôt Paris était le passé; tantôt tout l’avenir: et ces deux aspects se combinaient en un présent parfait’ (Paris, on the one hand, was wholly the past; on the other, it was wholly the future; and these two aspects combined to make a perfect present).21 If this magnificent European capital was vibrant, then even the journey there was exciting. According to Alan Dale, crossing the Atlantic in this era involved Americans in constant ‘flirtations’ on board ship. Though some ‘nervous passengers’ were ‘distracted’ by the ‘Wagnerian leit-motif’ of the fog horn, transatlantic sailing also furnished an abundance of the sort of popular music Tom enjoyed: ‘The banjo-soloist flourishes in mid-Atlantic … They have a repertoire of awe-inspiring rag-time.’ Passengers contributed their own songs, even when ill with mal de mer. Dale recalled a choir of twenty in deckchairs who ‘gave us the classic numbers of Vesta Victoria, Alice Lloyd, Vesta Tilley, Harry Lauder, and all the rest of the “vaudeville” nightingales of both sexes’.22 A young poet with a keen satirical eye, Tom disembarked in Europe with no shortage of material. Paris, though, for all that he had read about it, was stimulatingly new.

  He stopped off in England for a short time en route: his London Baedeker carries on its title page the solemnly dated black-ink inscription ‘Thomas S. Eliot, October the 14th, 1910’.23 But Paris was his destination. Bankrolled from St Louis, he had set up an arrangement with the stunningly palatial headquarters of Crédit Lyonnais at 19 boulevard des Italiens, in the second arrondissement not far from the Opéra, which allowed him to receive mail there. Tom, however, lived some distance away, on the other side of the Seine, in the Latin quarter. There he had secured a ‘petite chambre’ in a house looked after by an old French couple, the Casaubons. Madame Casaubon refreshed lodgers with tea from her gleaming silver teapot, and white-bearded Monsieur Casaubon was strikingly elegant. This French husband and wife were used to taking in Anglophone as well as Francophone boarders.24 There was ‘a prim but nice English lady’ whom Tom got to know a little; ‘she does not understand the American dialect’.25 Several other residents were Harvard men: liking to sport a ‘gold pince-nez’ the resonantly named, socialist-inclined Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Dana, grandson of the author of Two Years Before the Mast, shared Tom’s taste for Dante. Dana had come from Harvard two years earlier to lecture on English at the Sorbonne.26

  Arrested decades later in New York for allegedly propositioning a teenage boy, Dana, like another of the Pension Casaubon’s residents, Matthew Prichard, was probably homosexual.27 Tom’s brother had introduced him to Prichard, an Englishman who had worked for Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and had known Isabella Stewart Gardner. Tom later mentioned Prichard’s ‘very remarkable sensibility’; in Paris, like Tom, Prichard discussed Bergson’s philosophy. He was also friendly with English art critic Roger Fry and enthusiastic about Byzantine art at Ravenna and San Marco.28 Prichard had got to know Henri Matisse in 1909, introducing him to Byzantine visual culture. In 1910 he took Tom to meet Matisse.29 Going beyond Gauguin, Matisse was then experimenting with non-naturalistic colour, and had recently painted the ‘primitive’ frolicking female nudes of La Danse. Yet, later at least, Tom was wary of Prichard: ‘I should prefer not to see him again.’30

  When Tom arrived, Dana was already used to Paris. Certainly he could advise Monsieur Eliot who was to enrol as a foreign student at the Sorbonne and attend Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France. Prichard was able to tell Tom about Bergson, and emerging artistic developments such as Cubism and Futurism: Cubist art became a Paris sensation at an April 1911 exhibition; Futurism had featured in Le Figaro since at least 1909.31 ‘My opinions on art, as well as other subjects, have modified radically’, Tom wrote in 1911. In Paris, he recalled, ‘discussion of Bergson was apt to be involved with discussion of Matisse and Picasso’.32